


Don't care

by starsandsupernovae



Category: Marvel, Marvel (Comics), Marvel 616, The Avengers (Marvel Movies)
Genre: Flashbacks, Red Room (Marvel), team arguing, team bonding but not, trust what trust
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-12-18
Updated: 2017-12-18
Packaged: 2019-02-16 14:03:05
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,563
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/13055457
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/starsandsupernovae/pseuds/starsandsupernovae
Summary: basically everyone’s coming back from a painful mission and Natasha’s just completely fine. Steve wants to know why. Cue Red Room era flashback and pain





	Don't care

**Author's Note:**

> This is just something I typed up while ignoring all my WIPs to instead give pain to Natasha, i'm sorry. Please, leave a comment and let me know what you think!

“I don’t understand how you do it.” Steve said suddenly.  
The team was on the way back from a particularly harrowing mission, full of moral questions, questions to which there were no right answers only wrong ones they were forced to take, lives they were forced to take, and it showed the atmosphere was heavy, the entire team looking down at nothing or speaking in low tones. 

Except Natasha. Who was chewing gum and was playing -was that candy crush? on her phone.

“How I do what?” she looked up, her tone perfectly casual.

“Not give a damn.”

At this people tensed up, Clint sitting bolt upright, and next to Natasha, James opened his mouth, as though to object to Steve’s words, tossed at Natasha like daggers, but she deflected them with a shrug.

“I’m not sure what you mean. If it’s who I shot back there, you do realize that if I didn’t, the entire place would’ve gone up.”

“It’s not about who you _shot_ , Romanoff.” He spat out, angry now, angry at her indifference, the way she just sat there, chewing her gum. “We’ve all shot, we’ve all killed people who maybe didn’t deserve it. But the rest of care. The rest of us, when we have to do morally questionable things, we question it! And maybe we need to put those feelings aside for the day for the act but afterwards we feel something. And today, when people have died, good people, we care about them! And you just sit there, playing on your damn phone! Every time something goes wrong, or we do something wrong, _you don’t care!_ How do you do that?!” 

He hurled the words at her and these ones stuck, piercing through the shield she tried to always project around herself. She saw others trying to answer for her, they knew he wasn’t being fair, she didn’t owe him an answer for this. She shouldn’t answer this. But-

“How don’t I care?” she repeated, the quinjet going completely silent as she spoke.  
“You sit there in your pretty red white and blue uniform, everyone in the world looking at you like a prince in shining armor, with all of SHIELD behind you, in your world of right and wrong, and you ask _me_ how I don’t care?Are you sure you want to know? Because not caring isn’t something that comes easily. To really truly not care, that is something that’s learnt, over and over and over and over. It’s something you need to ask for. Do you want to know when I asked, Captain Rogers?”

Her voice was still low, but dangerously so, the low that warned people to stay away, the low that warned of the oncoming storm. The quiet that followed her statement was thick, heavy. Steve’s expression changed, as he subsided, realizing what he had said was out of line, but not taking it back now, not now that Natasha had started talking, telling them a story that he suddenly realized he didn’t really want to hear.

“I was young, a teenager, and it was an easy mission gone wrong” Natasha began. “A small peasant village in which the target was hiding. I don’t know why we had to kill him. I wasn’t given any information. Just a picture of his face and the knowledge that he had to die. I didn’t care. They weren’t even going to send me at first but there were rumors that he had protection. So they decided to add a black widow in training to the group, part of my training. When we came-” she dropped her gaze from Steve’s as she continued “Someone fucked up. They knew we were coming. We fought and they fell- _they fell, one by one, blood seeping from the bodies, staining the pure white snow scarlet, as she fought, bodies of enemies and allies alike dropping down around her, screams ringing out in the cold clear air. She watched as innocent people got caught in the crossfire, their yells of anguish adding on to those in battle as they fell, more scarlet on white until the landscape was one of pure ruin and loss, until the screams of the dying faded into the crying of the surviving. Natalia had stood back from the man who crumpled away from her, her knife lodged in his neck, deep crimson liquid fountaining out. She surveyed the scene emotionless as she had been trained, walking over to each of the slain enemy bodies, lying limp, like so many broken dolls in the stained snow to make sure they were dead. She watched as the peasants ran and crawled to their fallen families, cries of anguish ringing out around her as their worse fears were confirmed but she continued on, following her training, pushing feelings aside, making sure there was no threat left. The dead outnumbered the living she had noted, with this casualty rate, after they had seen all they had, it was unlikely they would keep any of them alive, it was not an emotional realization, just a fact, like the cold of the snow, or the brightness of the sun illuminating the scene. She saw out of the corner of her eye one woman, shot in the stomach, bleeding out onto the frozen ground attended to by a small girl of no more then five years who was clutching to her in tears.“What is it they will do with the survivors?” the womans voice croaked out. She had gotten hold of a gun but Natalia, out of her range as she lay immobilized on the ground was unworried. She answered, not seeing why not to._

_“There will be no survivors.” She paused considering. “The girl may be eligible for the Black Widow program. She would undergo the training and serve the Motherland as I do.”_  
A look of pure pain crossed the woman’s face, whether from her words or from her wound, Natalia couldn’t discern. “She would be like you? Kill so many and feel so little? Live as a tool to be used? Less then human?” She turned slowly to her daughter, too young to understand all that was happening, too young to witness any of this at all, and something in Natalia stirred, remembering herself at that age, too young much too young to see what she had seen, to do what Natalia had done. She watched as, with difficulty the woman turned back to her daughter, staring her in the eye.“You know I love you, baby. I love you so so much.”  
The girl nodded, blinded by the tears that were streaming down her small face.  
“And I’m so sorry my child. I am so so sorry. But I love you too much to let them take you.” Natalia realized what was happening too late. She moved quickly, but not quickly enough, not nearly fast enough to reach them in time, to stop the woman bringing her hand up, to stop the shot ringing out, to stop the girl’s look of shock replacing that of blind trust, to stop that look freezing on her face forever as her body slumped down onto the snow, to stop the woman crying out as she did so, a cry that pierced even the Black Widow, a yell of pain, of anguish, but most of all resolve, that her daughter would not be taken as Natalia had, taken and tortured and trained. That she would not be the monster that her mother looked up at. And the Black Widow, the cold assassin in training fell to the ground tears of her own rolling down her cheeks. 

There was a horrified silence as she finished talking, still with the same tone, still with the same expression on her face, dull and emotionless. She smiled then, a terrible stretch of her lips, that couldn’t reach her eyes which were brought back up to Steve who looked away, unable to face her gaze in that moment.

“And then I went back to the Red Room. And I asked them, I begged them to teach me how not to care. Because caring _hurt_. And maybe you, Steven Rogers can deal with that hurt. But that little girl, the one who kept being torn apart and remade, the little girl who knew she would have to keep doing these things, who knew what she was being made to be, she couldn’t deal with that hurt. And so she asked to stop being hurt, to stop caring. Because she was little and she had been shot, and she had been stabbed, and she could deal with all of that. But this was too much. And so they were willing to teach and she was willing to learn and she tried, she tried so hard not to question, not to care. And maybe it worked. Maybe it didn’t. But she did learn how not to show anything at all. Not to anyone, not ever. And maybe she was wrong, because this little girl did a lot of things wrong. But that’s how I did it, Captain. That’s how I learnt not to care.”

The doors open then, no one had noticed them landing until she had finished speaking and the spell was broken as she stood and walked away, leaving the rest of them in silence behind her.


End file.
